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If you are in a rush and want to learn how to say "Where can I find a good restaurant." this is fine. It is, however, riddled with errors that will throw the beginner off track. A serious student will not get a solid foundation with this course. If you have the time and are dedicated to really learning Portuguese, get the real thing - Mastering Portuguese.
I tried to buy Continental Portuguese and that is not what was, it was Brazilian Portuguese. How many of us would buy from just anyone advertising a really cheat copy of something online. It is a high risk and one I strongly regret because of this experience.Vendors can give excuses for bad rating which are false; the customer is not allowed to comment on the vendors false claims, nor update their comments based on the harrassing emails sent by the vendor to them because of the rating they gave them for very strange and bad service. The vendors who sell through Amazon can be Anybody, including those who are selling what they don't have and who are psycho - who now know your name and home address. Amazon hasn't addressed the saftey issue involved with this crazy nutcase vendor they let on their site to sell to their customers.And the vendor is still being allowed to sell from Amazon. I have brought many sale books through the vendors on Amazon and most have been very good. Because of who the vendor turned out to be; a simple issue became an ongoing problem of having to deal with a really crazy person.Beware - Amazon is Not a safe secure site if you buy sale books. That is what Amazon customers are actually doing when they buy sale books from vendors through Amazon.
But it only takes dealing with 1 psycho to regret ever taking the chance and buying from the vendors rather then only from Amazon directly. I strongly feel that Amazon endangers their customers by allowing anyone to sell through them without any knowledge or responsibility for their vendors. I sent some of the emails from the vendor to Amazon and got an apology but that did stop the emails.
Pronunciation exercises were great. Bought this course before traveling to Brazil for the first time and it was a blast to use. Already fluent in Spanish and French it was easy to pick up. I have been polishing up on the language through novels, movies and interacting with local speakers. Perhaps not the preferred course if this is the first "other" language you're learning.
I used this course and it was fine. However, I think that the Pimsleur courses are much more usable. I have since bought a 2nd home in Brazil, and speak quasi-fluent Portugese. I listen to all the different courses I have for refreshers from time to time, and I consistently find that the Pimsleur program is superior.However, this is a fine supplement, and you can learn from it things not on the Pimsleur program.
My fantasy: I would prepare for my trip to Portugal by listening to tapes while driving to work, learning the language naturally, supplementing by skimming the textbook included and using the dictionary/ phrasebook when I got there. The book is written for Brazilian Portuguese even though the tape (and package) is continental. Even the chapter on different dialects misses a wonderful opportunity to make up for this shortcoming by not saying the same word with the different accents, as the book suggests it will-- the tape contains only the continental pronunciation and gives no reference point. Without a huge effort, in a couple months I'd be able to get by.The reality: The tapes contain only a vocabulary list of the words used in the textbook. All the same, I have learned some phrases. Therefore it's impossible to get anything from the tape without reading the book at the same time- can't be used in the car. The tapes would be natural conversations where it would be easy to pick up phrases and pronunciation by context ("what's your name." "My name is Mary", etc). The deviations are noted in footnotes-- but detailed descriptions on how to pronounce everything in Brazilian are hard to get through if it happens to have a different pronunciation on the tape.
The words are all out of context, just a list read aloud. So much for "learning naturally". For a bestseller, I expected a whole lot more. The first five lessons are the hardest to get through, and I probably will get through most of it in a couple months if I don't give up in disgust.
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